Even amidst all the gloom that the current session of the Karnataka Assembly has painted, there is also something redeeming about it. Whether to frustrate Yeddyurappa, the anxious mountaineer who has never taken his eyes off the peak, or to sketch hope for prodigal sons to return; to ridicule the governor’s deadlines, or to teach the limits of its own orders to the Supreme Court, the process of seeking the trust vote has been winding. At least such a perception has been created. However, this meandering has been punched and punctuated by some delightful parliamentary speeches.
If one is pushed to pick a favourite from those delivered so far, it will be what Basavakalyan’s Congress legislator B Narayana Rao spoke, on Friday, 19 July evening. Krishna Byre Gowda who spoke earlier in the day was definitely in classic parliamentary form, his was prime time performance, but we are not discussing learning or intelligence here.
When Rao got up to speak, the House looked distracted and was keen to wrap up for the day. But he put it back in order with his direct message, drizzled with savage humour and sarcasm. The slice of wisdom he placed on the table must have not just pricked, but pierced the conscience of all three big leaders in the House: Siddaramaiah, HD Kumaraswamy and BS Yeddyurappa. While he did that he was not sanctimonious like Speaker Ramesh Kumar, who thinks he occupies a priestly pulpit and not a constitutional chair. He imagines he is addressing a depraved captive audience and not law makers.
Narayana Rao, quoting Basaveshwara, the 12th century mystic-reformer, asked a rhetorical question: How can you expect to reap a mango fruit when you have sown neem seeds? “With folded hands I beseech the sitting CM, past CM and the one who may occupy the chair tomorrow, please surround yourself with good people,” he said. “In our village they say you should befriend a good person, not the wrong type who’ll drag you down,” he added.
With this seemingly innocuous statement, Rao had not only characterized the defectors, but had exposed the hollowness of current political leadership across party lines, which unabashedly embraces the fixer as a friend. Rao further said: “You give tickets to real estate agents, builders and excise contractors, and expect them to stay loyal to a political ideal?” There was a moral urgency in his voice that resonated with the anguished reasoning on the streets. As if to give this view some academic sanctity, a well-regarded political scientist in a national daily wrote a few days back that the coalition government was falling apart because Kumaraswamy’s JDS was trying to “undercut the wheeler-dealer network” (involving mining, land, construction and transport) that Siddaramaiah’s Congress government had established. So, what are they really trying to save or seek vote of confidence for?
With the prompts from Rao’s speech, the questions to ask are as follows: What brought down Yeddyurappa in 2010? Who were his friends, followers and allies then? Who sent him to jail? Who are those who have put him on a blind spiral of ambition now? Next, who helped Kumaraswamy to form the government in 2006? What were their antecedents? What happened to them after? Who does he rely on now? Similarly, what kind of people surrounded Siddaramaiah when he was CM for five years? What kind of people did he appoint to institutions and nominate to the upper houses? What kind of advisors and officials have all these three handpicked, and why?
The defectors holed up in Mumbai know one part of the answer, for another part we’ll have to look at impostors who continue to move around these leaders. History is truly dead because none of these leaders aspire to glow on its pages. They do not care for their legacies. They are for the present and its deceptive pleasures. And what kind of legacy can they possibly construct with the variety they surround themselves with? They are perhaps so insecure that they have surrendered rectitude to the mediocrity of the will.
Therefore, in Narayan Rao’s language what else can neem seeds offer but a bitter yield. There has to be hope somewhere, and that may be in the therapeutic qualities of the very neem leaves. They may also make us reach for jaggery.